


poetry is about love (and not all love is romantic)

by I_writewhatiwant



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, and gabriela mistral as a consequence, nursey loves his grandmother very much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 10:02:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30053760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_writewhatiwant/pseuds/I_writewhatiwant
Summary: His Abuela smiles when she sees the cover, the mother and her sleeping child, and quotes a whole poem, her voice following a rhythm that seems universal as she calls for him to take her hand, and Derek falls in love with poetry.
Relationships: Derek "Nursey" Nurse/William "Dex" Poindexter, but very background
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	poetry is about love (and not all love is romantic)

When Derek was six, his Mamá bought him his first poetry book when they’re visiting her parents in Chile. It’s called _Poesía Infantil_ , and it costs around three dollars from a man on the street with a box full of children’s books, all required readings on schools. The cover is a little faded from being on the sun and the pages are brown and rough, and his Mamá smiles when she hands it to him. It’s in Spanish, and every so often he has to stop reading to ask the meaning of words, but he finishes at least three poems on the bus back to the house.

His Abuela smiles when she sees the cover, the mother and her sleeping child, and quotes a whole poem, her voice following a rhythm that seems universal as she calls for him to take her hand, and Derek falls in love with poetry. That whole week he sits by her side at night and lets her read a couple of pages, just her old voice flowing over the words without hesitation and his little brown fingers touching the simple drawings under the poems. 

He colors the drawings with his cousin’s _lápices_ _scripto_ , and the ink bleeds from one page to the other, little dots where he lets the pencil rest.

He goes home with his book full of colors, a 5000 pesos bill among its pages and a love letter from his grandmother on the edges of _Caricia_.

Derek is fourteen, just starting at Andover, when he reads the title. It’s not English, but it doesn’t matter. _Errant Girl, letters to Doris Dana,_ it reads. He goes home that weekend to have dinner with his moms and takes his book back with him, reads it on his dorm before lights out, and among its pages finds his Mamá’s love for him, finds his grandmother’s weathered hands and the hooked nose he inherited from her and her raspy voice next to his ear, reciting love poems just for him. Among poems and lullabies he finds the words to come out.

Derek is eighteen when he goes to Samwell and takes a Latin Poetry course. In the final essay, among the dozens of Neruda’s analyses, among the hundred _I like for you to be still_ and _I love you without knowing how,_ Derek places his _make her queen, they would place her on a throne where my feet do not reach,_ and thinks of his grandmother a thousand miles away, on the house with red floors and the chipped front door, and thinks of her voice saying _the first Latin-American to win the Nobel Prize of Literature_.

Derek fights with Dex and fills notebooks with rage filled poems and passages, and it takes semesters for them to reach enough understanding to be friends, and it takes months for him to start filling notebooks with autumn inspired sonnets and freckled odes, and when he goes to sleep and thinks of Dex’s internalized fears, he thinks _the man, blind, ignores that there where you stand, a flower of living light you leave_.

It’s junior year and Dex looks at him and asks for a love poem, and Derek takes his book, goes to the page where the corner of the cheap page fell off from being dog-eared so much, and reads outloud, _the sea, her million waves, rocking, divine. Hearing the loving seas, I rock my boy._

Dex says it doesn’t rhyme. Derek says he’s translating as he reads, because it’s in Spanish and he has never looked up an oficial translation. Dex says it’s not a love poem. Derek says of course it is. Dex hums. Derek reads Neruda the next time he asks for a love poem.

Derek is twenty-three when he and his parents travel to Chile, and he holds his grandmother’s hand in the big hospital room, seven other strangers in the other beds, and thinks _these little eyes you gave me, I have to wear them down, following you through the valleys, through the sky and the sea_.

Derek is thirty-five when his daughter asks for a love poem. He takes a battered book, more tape than pages, and starts to recite _we were all to be queens, of four kingdoms above the sea_.


End file.
